We’ve all experienced the inconveniences of a spotty internet connection, from access interruptions at work to your favorite shows buffering at the most tense moments. Years of major outages have served as a reminder that the internet can also face broader problems, bringing daily operations to a halt. But could the entire internet around the world go down?
The Internet is often referred to as a “network of networks,” including those that link devices across homes, businesses, public spaces, and more. Therefore, for the entire Internet to go down, a lot of infrastructure would have to be affected within a short period of time.
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Because a significant amount of “heterogeneity, randomness, and distributed asynchrony” is built into the Internet from the beginning, system-wide failures are extremely unlikely and extremely difficult to cause, Saibenko said. “There are also local networks, such as within homes and businesses, that may continue to function even if the global nature of the Internet ceases to function,” he explained.
When information is shared over the Internet (for example, when a text message is sent from one smartphone to another), the information is divided into small packets of information, and each packet is routed through the fastest available path on the network. This means that even if one of these routes is compromised, messages can still be sent because there is a long list of alternatives, according to the Open University.
This design consideration alone can protect the entire network from physical damage (for example, if a submarine cable is severed or a large Internet hub loses power) or complete failure due to system problems or software damage by a hacker. Even if a large infrastructure provider like Cloudflare were to go down, the disruption would only last a few hours and not spread to other providers or systems.
If a large-scale power outage occurs, such as due to an unexpectedly strong solar storm, it may take time to repair. But many governments and large companies have plans in place for how to recover from a major internet outage and resume operations as quickly as possible, which often includes tools such as cloud storage systems and backup generators, Saibenko said.
Conversely, some governments shut down the internet during large-scale protests. According to the World Economic Forum, this is accomplished by dismantling or destroying internet infrastructure such as power grids and fiber optic cables, or through throttling, which intentionally limits the speed of internet connections through broadband providers. However, even these intentional outages can be resolved relatively quickly.
“It’s amazing how quickly people recover.” [the internet] “It continues to perplex people how resilient the internet is,” William Dutton, senior research fellow and advisory board member at the Oxford Internet Institute and founding professor of internet studies at the University of Oxford, told Live Science.
But in the meantime, the impact of such an outage could be more than an inconvenience. Critical infrastructure such as hospital IT systems often relies on the internet, and critical services such as power grids and traffic management may be shut down indefinitely.
“The more the Internet becomes central to a variety of functions, from medicine to war, the more important its security and reliability become,” Dutton said. “These types of power outages, even for a short period of time, are obviously concerning.”
Since the invention of the Internet, there has been widespread concern that as the Internet continues to expand, it risks straining or overloading its infrastructure. But Dutton says this is a common misconception.
“The more you add nodes and things like that, the more resilient the Internet actually becomes. In fact, growth makes the Internet stronger, not weaker,” Dutton said. That’s certainly a possibility, but I don’t think it will collapse at all.
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